Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  He worked harder than ever. In the same month that he married Frida, he had been appointed Director of the Academy of San Carlos, the art school he had attended as a boy, and he set out to revolutionize the school’s curriculum and power structure. He devised a system of apprenticeship in which the school became a workshop instead of an academy. Teachers were, he said, to be subject to the appraisal of the students, and students were to think of themselves as artisans or technical workers. (Not surprisingly, opposition to Rivera’s directorship grew, until less than a year after he had been hired, he was fired.)

  He also painted prodigiously. By the end of 1929 he had finished the murals in the Ministry of Public Education; designed the scenes, props, and costumes for the ballet H.P. (Horse Power), composed by Carlos Chávez; finished a series of six large female nudes symbolizing Purity, Strength, Knowledge, Life, Moderation, and Health for the assembly hall of the Ministry of Health Building; and designed four stained-glass windows for the same building. Finally, he had begun his epic murals showing the Mexican people from the preconquest epoch to the present and even into the future on the walls of the main stairway of the National Palace. He was to work at the National Palace intermittently for six years, and not until the mid-1950s did he finish the panels of the upstairs corridor.

  Frida did not paint much in the first months of her marriage. Being married to Diego was a full-time job. When he fell ill from strain, in September, she nursed him, carefully copying down the doctor’s program for curing the collapse, and doing her best to make her husband follow orders. When he recovered, she was spiritually at his side for the absurd and humiliating Party trial, and she left the Party when he was expelled. Diego’s almost superhuman work schedule (once when he was on a round-the-clock stint, he fell asleep on the scaffold and tumbled to the pavement below) did not inspire industry in Frida. Rather it taught her that the best way to see Rivera was to join him on the scaffold, where she was content to leave the role of genius to her husband, to play the great man’s young wife. Oddly, she learned how to cater to his fancies from Lupe Marín, who arrived one day, took a good look around the house, whisked her off to La Merced market to buy pots and pans and other equipment, and then taught the young bride how to cook the foods Diego liked. In return, Frida painted Lupe’s portrait.

  From Lupe, too, Frida learned to take his midday meal to Diego in a basket decorated with flowers and covered by napkins embroidered with sayings like “I adore you.” It was a custom adopted from Mexican campesinas, who carry their husbands’ lunch to them in the fields.

  If Diego was “homeless” as a result of his expulsion from the Party, he was unchastened: in December 1929 he accepted a commission from the American ambassador to Mexico, Dwight W. Morrow, to paint a mural in the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca. The details were settled when Frida and Diego dined with the ambassador and his wife, the great personal charm of the four diners eclipsing what otherwise might have been perceived as a series of ironies. Here was an American capitalist—one who in 1928 had persuaded the government of President Plutarco Elías Calles to make an informal agreement to modify legislation dealing with Mexican oil rights in a way that favored U.S. investors—commissioning a Communist to paint a mural with an anti-imperialist subject: the fresco shows the brutalities of the Spanish conquest and the glories of the Mexican Revolution, with Zapata as hero, leading a white horse. At the same table was Diego Rivera, a vehement Marxist even if he had recently been ousted from the Party, accepting the commission—the same Diego Rivera who, acting as a member of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas, had, only months earlier, denounced the encroachment by Wall Street on Latin America and who, acting as a member of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc, had headed a commission to free from jail the secretary of the Communist party together with many other Communist demonstrators detained for insulting Ambassador Morrow during a violent political demonstration.

  Nor was the artist inclined to spurn the ambassador’s further gesture of good will: when diplomatic duties took the Morrows to London in late December, they left their lovely rambling weekend house in Cuernavaca to Frida and Diego for the better part of the year it took to complete the murals. There, in the more element weather and gentler atmosphere of the beautiful town on the low slope of a mountain some fifty miles from Mexico City, Frida and Diego had their honeymoon. While Diego worked, Frida wandered in terraced gardens, among fountains, oleander, and banana trees. From a small tower she could look north toward the village of Tres Marías and the mountains that divide the high plateau of Mexico City from the warm, fertile valley of Morelos; south toward the cathedral tower; and east toward the snow-topped volcanos Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl.

  When Frida was not at home, she was most often at the Cortés Palace watching Diego paint. He valued her criticism, for she was as quick to detect falseness or pretension in art as in people, and as the years went on he came to depend more and more on her judgments. Frida was tactful; if she had something negative to say, she would soften the impact by making the suggestion with a certain tentativeness or by couching it in a question. Sometimes her comments were irritating, but Rivera paid attention, and sometimes he made changes. He loved, for example, to tell the story of Frida’s reaction to his depiction of Zapata leading a white horse (Zapata’s horse had been black) in the Cortés Palace mural. When she saw the sketch, she let out a shriek and said, “But, Diego, how can you paint Zapata’s horse white?” Rivera argued that he should create beautiful things for “the people,” and the horse remained white. But when Frida criticized the horse’s heavy legs, Diego handed her his sketch and let her draw them the way she thought they should be. “I had to correct that white horse of Zapata,” he chuckled, “according to Frida’s wishes!”

  The Riveras’ “honeymoon” certainly lacked any of the usual languor. Art historian Luis Cardoza y Aragón, who visited the couple, described his days in Cuernavaca as a sleepless marathon of adventure and talk. Diego, he said, got up early and went to work. Frida and her guest slept late and enjoyed a large and leisurely breakfast together, after which they would make excursions to nearby towns—Taxco, Iguala, Tepoztlán, Cuautla. In the evenings they picked up Rivera, who inevitably would be taking advantage of the last rays of the sun or even painting by the dimmer light of a lamp. In spite of his long workday, he was always fresh and full of enthusiasm for the night’s possibilities. The three friends would find a restaurant and straightaway order a bottle of tequila. Diego’s stories began with the first glass. As they unfolded, the bottle emptied, and the episodes grew more and more extravagant. Once he got started, Diego did not want to stop, and the talk continued long after the party had returned home. Eventually Frida would abandon her weary but spellbound guest to the man he fondly called “the monster,” and go to bed. After a week or so Cardoza fled, but his vivid memories stayed with him always. “Frida,” he wrote, “was grace, energy, and talent united in one of the beings who has most stirred my imagination to enthusiasm. Diego and Frida were part of the spiritual landscape of Mexico, like Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl in the valley of Anahuac.”

  During the months in Cuernavaca, probably for the first time since her marriage, Frida painted. A lost canvas depicting a nude Indian woman from the waist up surrounded by tropical leaves must have been produced at this time, as must also Frida’s portrait of Lupe Marín and several of the portraits of Indian children. Very likely Frida’s third Self-Portrait (figure 18) comes from the Cuernavaca sojourn too.

  There are subtle differences between the married woman depicted in the third Self-Portrait and the fiancée shown in the second, where Frida is Rivera’s niña bonita—the pretty young girl whose freshness and candor he adored. Now instead of looking straight ahead with the undauntable directness of youth, Frida’s face is turned at an angle, and her eyes seem to glisten with sadness. The mouth whose slightly upturned corners in the 1929 portrait made it look so insolent and firm, so ready to laugh, now looks melancholy. The change is a
question of millimeters: the tiniest curve or shadow can completely alter facial expression.

  Years later, Frida told a friend what happened in the months that intervened between these two self-portraits: “We could not have a child, and I cried inconsolably but I distracted myself by cooking, dusting the house, sometimes by painting, and every day going to accompany Diego on the scaffold. It gave him great pleasure when I arrived with the midday meal in a basket covered with flowers.” After three months of pregnancy, Frida had an abortion because the fetus was in the wrong position. In a 1930 drawing of herself and Rivera, she drew, and then erased, a baby Diego seen as if by X-ray vision inside her stomach: the infant’s head is up, his feet are down. Frida ana the Caesarean Operation, a curious and probably unfinished painting dated 1931, must likewise refer to the 1930 abortion. (She had never had a Caesarean operation, but she mentioned the possibility in a 1932 letter to a friend, saying a doctor had told her that in spite of her fractured pelvis and spine, she would be able to have a child by Caesarean section.) Besides her disappointment at not being able to bring her child to term, there were doubtless other unhappinesses in Frida’s first year of marriage. It is said, for example, that Rivera had an affair with his young assistant Ione Robinson in 1930. Whatever the cause, Frida had to confront the fact that the misfortunes that marred her childhood would be equaled or surpassed by miseries in her adult life. “I suffered two grave accidents in my life,” she once said. “One in which a streetcar knocked me down. . . . The other accident is Diego.”

  Their marriage was, to contemporary observers, a union of lions, their loves, battles, separations, and sufferings beyond petty censuring. Like saints or demigods, they needed no surnames: “Diego” and “Frida” were coin of the Mexican national treasure. Yet those who knew them best offer the most conflicting and contrasting appraisals of their life together.

  Friends’ insights, of course, depend on when they knew the Riveras. Still it can be said that almost everything that is “in” a marriage is there from the beginning, that all the characteristics and contradictions are present, suspended in a kind of psychological medium from which some aspects rise to the surface at one time, some at another, constantly separating and recombining in a thousand different ways. Thus we may say that from the beginning Frida loved Diego obsessively, or we may believe those who assert that she only grew to love him over time or that she sometimes hated him and wanted to free herself from his hold on her. Frida was in thrall to Diego’s prodigal imagination—and bored by his endless fable-spinning. He was an unfaithful husband, of that there can be no doubt. But if Frida despaired at her husband’s infidelities, there were times when she said she “couldn’t care less” and was actually amused by Diego’s affairs. Almost everyone agrees that Frida became a mother figure to Diego, yet the father-daughter relationship of the early years remained important until her death. Where is the truth? Surely it does not lie conveniently or neatly with one interpretation or another, but rather it twists and turns to take in all the contradictions.

  There is no question that even when she hated him, Frida adored Diego, and that the pivot of her existence was her desire to be a good wife for him. This did not mean eclipsing herself: Rivera admired strong and independent women; he expected Frida to have her own ideas, her own friends, her own activities. He encouraged her painting and the development of her unique style. When he built a house for them, it was in fact two separate houses, linked only by a bridge. That she tried to earn her living so as not to depend on him for support and that she kept her maiden name pleased him. And if he did not open car doors for her, he opened worlds: he was the great maestro; she chose to be his admiring compañera. Being that brought into her life a palette of many colors, colors that were of a dazzling brightness, or somber with sorrow, but always combined in ways that were piercingly alive. Bertram Wolfe noted in his biography of Rivera:

  As is natural with two such strong characters, each totally directed from within, each wayward in an impulse and intense in sensibility, their life together was stormy. She subordinated her waywardness to his; otherwise life with Diego would have been impossible. She saw through his subterfuges and fantasies, laughed with and at his adventures, mocked at and enjoyed the color and wonder of his tall tales, forgave him his affairs with other women, his wounding stratagems, his cruelties.... Despite quarrels, brutality, deeds of spite, even a divorce, in the depths of their beings they continued to give first place to each other. Or rather, to him she came first after his painting and after his dramatizing of his life as a succession of legends, but to her he occupied first place, even before her art. To his great gifts, she held, great indulgence was in order. In any case, she told me once, with rueful laughter, that was how he was, and that was how she loved him. “I cannot love him for what he is not.”

  Gradually, Frida made herself into an essential pillar in the framework of Rivera’s existence. Astute at discerning her husband’s areas of vulnerability and need, she created in these areas ties to herself. In his autobiography, he called Frida “the most important fact in my life” (it should be noted, however, that the book’s title, My Art, My Life, gives precedence to art).

  Letters from Diego to Frida exhibited in the Frida Kahlo Museum reveal a tender solicitousness on the part of a man better known for his formidable thoughtlessness and for the brutal single-mindedness of his absorption in himself and his work. Often he signed his name by drawing his large lips and writing that they carried millions of kisses. A typical opening was: “Child of my eyes I leave you thousands of kisses.” Or “To my beautiful little girl,” or “For lovely Fisita, For the child of my eyes, life of my life.” Such notes were paralleled by charming gestures—sometimes, like the notes themselves, intended to compensate for absences or neglect, as when one dawn, after a night on the town with lady tourists, he returned to Coyoacán with a cartload of flowers.

  They demonstrated their tender feelings for each other in words and gestures. Mariana Morillo Safa, who knew them during the last decade of their time together, recalls how Frida used to listen for the sound of Rivera’s homecoming each day. She would keep very still, and then, when she heard him at the door, she would whisper, “There’s Diego!” He would kiss her fleetingly on the mouth. “How is my Fridita, my little child of my soul?” he would ask, as if he were talking to a child. “She treated him like a god,” Mariana observes. “He treated her like a sweet thing.”

  Some observers feel that the affectionate nicknames they used for one another—“Frog-toad” or “Niña Fisita"—were all part of a charade, a gloss on the problems that persisted in their relationship, or another sign of their insistence on their Mexicanness, since diminutives of endearment are typical of Mexican as opposed to Castilian Spanish. Perhaps. But Cachucha Carmen Jaime remembers the “entranced” look on Rivera’s face when he came home and stood on the threshold of Frida’s room saying, “Chicuita” (a baby-talk version of chiquita, meaning “little one").

  In Frida’s first Self-Portrait she is dressed in a luxurious velvet Renaissance-style gown. In her second she presents herself as one of “the people” and, most emphatically, as a Mexican. Her lace-trimmed blouse is typical of the inexpensive clothes sold in Mexican market stalls, and her jewelry—colonial-style earrings and pre-Columbian jade beads—symbolizes the painter’s identity as a mestiza (a person of mixed Indian and Spanish blood). “In another period I dressed like a boy with shaved hair, pants, boots, and a leather jacket,” Frida said once. “But when I went to see Diego I put on a Tehuana costume.”

  Clearly, it was not bohemian casualness that had prompted Frida to choose for her wedding dress the borrowed clothes of an Indian maid. When she put on the Tehuana costume, she was choosing a new identity, and she did it with all the fervor of a nun taking the veil. Even when she was a girl, clothes were a kind of language for Frida, and from the moment of her marriage, the intricate links between dress and self-image, and between personal style and painting style, form on
e of the subplots in her unfolding drama.

  The costume she favored was that of the women from the isthmus of Tehuantepec, and the legends surrounding them doubtless informed her choice: Tehuantepec women are famous for being stately, beautiful, sensuous, intelligent, brave, and strong. Folklore has it that theirs is a matriarchal society where women run the markets, handle fiscal matters, and dominate the men. And the costume is a lovely one: an embroidered blouse and a long skirt, usually of purple or red velvet, with a ruffle of white cotton at the hem. Accessories include long gold chains or necklaces of gold coins, which constitute a girl’s hard-earned dowry, and for special occasions an elaborate headdress with starched lace pleats reminiscent of an outsized Elizabethan ruff.

  Sometimes Frida wore costumes from other times and places; sometimes she mixed elements of different costumes in one carefully composed ensemble. She might wear Indian huaraches (sandals) or short leather boots of the type worn in the provinces in the beginning of the century as well as by the soldaderas who had fought alongside their men in the Mexican Revolution; sometimes, as when she posed for the photographer Imogen Cunningham, she wrapped her rebozo around her in the manner of a soldadera. Other times she wore an elaborately embroidered and fringed Spanish silk shawl. Layers of petticoats, their hems embroidered by Frida herself with ribald Mexican sayings, gave her walk a special grace and sway.